My guess is that it’s the theme, that of a man who has sinned and is redeemed. But how can that be? After all, Terry’s act of self-redemption breaks the great childhood taboo: Don’t snitch on your friends. Don’t call for the cop! Our hero is a “rat,” or for intellectuals, an informer. But that didn’t seem to bother anyone in the audience, not given our villains, those whom Terry was fingering. Which is proof that Budd Schulberg struck a deep human craving there: redemption for a sinner, rescue from damnation. Redemption, isn’t that the promise of the Catholic Church? That a man can turn his fate around and by an act of good heart be saved at last? There are gut reasons like that for the success of the great hits. They touch a fundamental hunger in people. Yes, that a man can, no matter what he’s done, be redeemed—particularly if he has a sympathetic young woman as his confessor. She’s better than a priest, but does the same job. That is why Budd’s insistence on the prominence of the love story was so instinctively correct. It was during those most tender moments that Marlon enlisted the audience in his favor. Is it possible that many more people than we imagine have a feeling that they’ve done wrong and yearn for forgiveness and rescue? Wasn’t Brando playing out the hopes of the audience? Something like that must have gone on, because people have told me that they’ve seen this film a dozen times; every night it’s on TV, they make sure to see it. Apparently it’s more than entertainment. Something central has been touched. And it’s bigger than anything Budd and I had devised. We didn’t know what we had or what we’d done. For instance, try and repeat a great success, and you’ll surely fail.